Over the years, there have been a number of attempts by filmmakers to adapt video games to the big screen, ranging from big-budget efforts like the various takes on Tomb Raider to the el cheapo craptaculars from Uwe Boll, but with very few exceptions (I do have a soft spot for the increasingly wild and baroque Resident Evil films with Milla Jovovich and believe that Christophe Gans’s underrated Silent Hill was a genuinely impressive exercise in surreal horror), both gamers and cineastes would agree that the vast majority of them have stunk. Now comes Borderlands, Eli Roth’s long-delayed (which he shot before going off to make last year’s Thanksgiving) adaptation of the long-running game franchise and while I don’t know if I could actually say that it represents the nadir of a sub-genre that also includes the likes of Super Mario Brothers, Alone in the Dark and Five Nights at Freddys, it is bad enough that one could certainly have that conversation, though they might soon consider setting themselves on fire as a way of getting out of it.
Oscar winner Cate Blanchett stars as Lilith, a tough-as-nails bounty hunter who is hired by powerful corporate head Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), to retrieve his teenage daughter, Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), who was recently kidnapped by former Atlas soldier Roland (Kevin Hart) and hulking brute Krieg (Florian Munteneau). Alas, they have been tracked to the planet of Pandora—not the one from Avatar but a burned-out wasteland that will seem familiar to anyone who recalls the numerous Mad Max ripoffs that flourished in the 1980s—and while Lilith is not eager to return to what turns out to have been her home planet, the money is too good to refuse. She finds them quickly enough but it transpires that they are actually there to find the keys to a hidden vault that only Tina can supposedly open and which contains some all-powerful thing that they want to keep out of Atlas’s hands. Lilith joins up with them and the group, whose ranks eventually include wise-cracking robot Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black) and scientist Tannis (Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis), go in search of the keys and vault in an adventure that involves plenty of game-like levels, hordes of bad guys to decimate, a half-baked prophecy and an inexplicable drive through a virtual waterfall of urine because why not?
Having never played the Borderlands games before, I will leave it to others to answer the question of how faithful it is to the source material. Taken strictly on cinematic terms, however, I can tell you that the whole enterprise is an embarrassment of mammoth proportions. The screenplay by Roth and Joe Crombie (the latter reportedly a pseudonym for Craig Mazin (who went on to do the acclaimed HBO adaptation of the game The Last of Us) is little more than a mishmash of elements cribbed from other projects, with the Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad films proving to be particular sources of “inspiration”), characters that run the gamut from boring to spectacularly obnoxious and a third-act stab at sincerity that brings the already-draggy proceedings to a full stop long before the blessed arrival of the end credits.As for the stars, they seem to be deploying coping mechanisms for dealing with what they must have realized very early on was a doomed project—no one seems to be having any fun (even Hart is far more subdued than usual) and Blanchett and Curtis in particular seem actively embarrassed by the proceedings.
Roth (and the uncredited Tim Miller, who stepped in to do a couple of weeks of reshoots after Roth went off to do Thanksgiving) fails to bring any sort of invention or energy to the staging of the big action scenes, all of which becomes exercises in chaotic tedium amidst sets that look and feel like junked remains from a movie you would much rather be seeing than this one. He never finds the right tone for the material, lurching from arch humor to straightforward action to human drama without making any of them work. Additionally, the film can never quite decide whether it is trying to be a kids movie (a genre that Roth, mostly known for super-gory horror films, explored with surprising success in The House with a Clock in its Walls) or a hard-R action epic and winds up hitting a weird middle ground that is way too violent for younger viewers but not nearly bloody enough for Roth’s fan base. (Rumors suggest that it was originally intended to be a R-rated film but a decision was made at some point to tone things down to get a PG-13 instead.)
Borderlands is clearly one of the most appallingly awful films of this or most other years but perhaps the worst thing about it is the sense of utter waste that it represents—a waste of money (a budget reportedly north of $100 million, precious little of which seems to have made it onto the screen), a waste of talent (including, and I cannot stress this enough, two Oscar winners) and a waste of time for both those who made and those unfortunate enough to find themselves watching it. Of course, despite the fact that its status as a bomb seems pretty much a certainty—at the public screening I attended (Lionsgate may have been foolish enough to make this dud but they were smart enough not to show it to critics ahead of time), I was the only one there—it most likely will not bring an end to people trying (and mostly failing) to make movies out of video games. However, when it comes to people trying to think of a title that perfectly sums up all of the ghastly flaws of that particular sub-genre, Borderlands will no doubt serve as the Platonic ideal for a long time to come.